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Benazir Bhutto in
Islamabad, 1992 |
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Khalid Hasan with Begum
Bhutto, Kriesky Award visit, Austria 1987
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Being a Bhutto, she was
born with a photographic memory. She remembered but she did not
settle scores. During her two stints in office, she who had a lot of
scores to settle had the grace not
to settle any
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At the Kriesky Award
ceremony, 1987 |
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BB at her Barbican flat,
1984 or 1985 |
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In Simla, the Indians
wanted ZAB to see Pakeezah. ZAB was not interested but felt it would
be rude to say no, so he asked me to escort Benazir to the cinema on
Simla’s fabled Mall ... we later went to a bookshop where I bought
lots of books for ZAB |
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Benazir and Begum Bhutto
at the Kreisky Award ceremony |
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At a party meeting,
London 2005 |
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When I passed on to her
a suggestion someone had made asking her to become Pakistan’s Sonia
Gandhi, she wrote, “Luckily, I come from a village in Larkana rather
than Italy” |
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Speaking at Johns
Hopkins University, Washington 1995 |
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“Those close to my
father all know that he wanted me to go into politics ... The
greatest consolation I have is that I lived up to my father’s
expectations and faced each crisis with fortitude as (he) would have
wanted me to do” |
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Benazir with Bilawal on
the cover of Paris Match |
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BB with Khalid Hasan
(middle) and Shaheen Sehbai,
Washington, 2004/5
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BB at party meeting in
London 2005 with Akbar Khawaja (L) and Shah Mehmood Qureshi
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No matter where she was,
she was accessible to those she wanted to stay in touch with. I have
seen her ‘sent by blackberry device’ emails replied within two
minutes of being received. No matter how critical a question asked
of her, she would handle it with a cool answer. No matter what she
thought of you, she was always respectful
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Benazir Bhutto’s last
photograph |
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A family picture sent as
a
New Year card |
 f Benazir Bhutto was to be
summed up in one word, that word would be kind. Indomitable though her
will was, and extraordinary the courage she was gifted with, behind her
sometimes steely exterior lay a deeply humane woman who felt for the poor
and the deprived, a quality she had inherited from her father. In many
respects, she resembled him, but in several ways she was quite different
from him. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto found it hard to forgive those who had once
crossed him, or who he thought had crossed him. Even minor incidents,
sometimes quite innocent, he found hard to overlook or let go. That was
his great failing. When I mentioned this once to Maulana Kausar Niazi, he
took a deep breath and replied philosophically that the failings of great
men were also often great.
Benazir was forgiving. She had an
amazing capacity to take personal abuse – and that was one count on which
she was never to want. She would shrug her shoulders and move on. She
preferred to concentrate on the essentials of her relationships with
people, not the trivia that often gets to define them. She was by nature a
generous person. She did not harbour a grudge; but being a Bhutto, she was
born with a photographic memory. She remembered but she did not settle
scores. During her two stints in office, both cut in the middle, one by
the renegade Farooq Leghari, she who had a lot of scores to settle had the
grace not to settle any. I went back with her a long way. A week after ZAB
took office in the dying days of that catastrophic year of 1971, he sent
for me and asked me to work for him. Until then, the press officer to the
president – which ZAB then was – was called a public relations officer,
which I thought was more appropriate to someone selling soap. I said that
much to ZAB and suggested that I should be his press secretary. “Fine,” he
said, “but not the kind they have in America.” Benazir was in school in
the US by then. She came home for a visit around then and that is when I
first spoke to her. From amongst ZAB’s children, my rapport was with the
precocious Shahnawaz who had a sharp mind and on whose face I always saw a
smile full of mischief. But I’ll leave that story for another
day.
As I sit here in faraway Washington trying to write this, my
mind goes to and fro over the vast stretch of years that divide then from
now. Let me cite one example of Benazir’s ability, her gift I would say,
to refuse to take offence where most others would. Some years ago, in a
long memoir I wrote of her father, I described an incident involving the
teenager Benazir in New York in 1971 when ZAB had come to the United
Nations to try to retrieve what he could of his disintegrating country’s
honour. This was what I wrote, “My friend Hayat Mehdi, who was deputy
permanent representative at Pakistan’s UN Mission, Agha Shahi being the
permanent representative, told me that as he went to Bhutto’s room to pick
up some papers that he wanted, he nearly fell to the floor with shock when
he heard the teenage Benazir, who had come from her school in the East to
be with her father, chattering away on the phone to a friend telling her
what her father was going to do the next day at the UN and that she should
not miss it on television. I am not sure if Mehdi snatched the phone from
her hand or put his hand on her mouth as she was giving away the best-kept
secret of the day. Next day, Bhutto entered the Security Council looking
grim and made the most emotional, though well-prepared, speech of his
career. It was in that speech that he said, ‘I have not come here to
accept abject surrender. If the Security Council wants me to be a party of
the legalisation of abject surrender, then I say that under no
circumstances, shall it be so. The United Nations resembles those fashion
houses which hide ugly realities by draping ungainly figures in alluring
apparel’.”
I never sent Benazir the book that included my Bhutto
memoir for fear that some of what I had written might offend her. A few
years ago, on one of her visits to Washington, she told me that she had
read the book and liked it. “But there is one thing that you got wrong,”
she added. When I asked her what it was, she replied that the 1971
incident I had described had never taken place. “I am sorry,” I said, “but
I wrote what Hayat Mehdi had told me, word for word.” “Then that is not
your fault, but of the person who told you,” she said. Having worked with
her father and been in situations where he took umbrage at something
written about him, I could never imagine him just dropping the matter and
moving on. She was like that. She was not bitter and she had this
tremendous capacity to go on, no matter what the odds and how difficult
the situation in which she found herself. When she came to America on one
of her lecture tours, she always found time to meet her party workers, her
friends, whose number always remained large, and even those who merely
wanted to meet her because she was Benazir Bhutto. Some of them had no
interest in politics or in her as such. I suppose they met her in order to
be able to let drop casually at a later social evening that they had spent
time with her the other day. Her brow never furrowed when in company that
could not possibly have been the source of any pleasure or benefit to her.
Like her father, she remembered names, especially of her party
workers.
Benazir did not attend the all parties conference
organised by Nawaz Sharif in London last summer. While she sent three
members of the party, including what I described in a piece as “the
fragrant Sherry Rehman,” she herself went off to Paris, though she
remained connected to what was going on - laptop to laptop. I wrote about
it tongue in cheek but she was not offended. When she came to the US this
year after the living arrangement with Musharraf had been successfully
brokered by the Americans and the British, she stayed in New York for more
than two weeks. Once again, she was not offended by what I had written,
which was, “The Musharraf-Bhutto arrangement is viewed as one best
equipped to deal with the ‘spectre of terrorism and extremism’ – as the
mantra has it. To that end, high-gloss exposure of Ms. Bhutto, the
acceptable face of the Musharraf regime, has been facilitated. There is
the long arm of the government and then there is the well-financed and
well-connected, high-powered public relations and lobbying network to
which the United States is home. Selling, be it soap or politicians, local
or foreign, has been perfected to an art form in this country. Ms. Bhutto
stands sold.” She phoned to say before she left New York that she was
finally returning home. When I asked her if journalists would be going
with her, she asked me to come along. The next day, I received a mail from
Farhatullah Babar asking for passport number and the rest. As it was, I
did not go, having had things to do here requiring my presence.
She had a puckish sense of humour and there was a glint in her eye
and a childlike expression of mischief on her face when she wanted to
tease someone. Her loyal follower, former Senator Akbar Khawaja, who would
not leave her side whenever she came to the US – and she let him do that
because she obviously must have liked him – was and remains a good friend
of mine. Writing about her last visit to Washington, I took a gentle dig
at Akbar Khawaja when I wrote, “Benazir Bhutto was in town for three days,
but had it been left to former Senator Akbar Khawaja, who followed her
like a shadow and never let her out of his sight till such time as he
would be told to go home and grab some shut-eye, we would never have known
she was here. That being so, if there is a prize for keeping secrets,
Akbar Khawaja should get it.” Akbar told me later that in Karachi, where
he had gone with her from London, she turned around and found him standing
behind her. That was at Bilawal House. She said, “Oh! it is you. I am
going to tell Khalid.”
She also told him once, “Khalid is family.”
I think one reason she always treated me with great affection and much
respect was because I had never asked her for anything when by any
measure, I should have been at least accorded what I had voluntarily
turned my back on after the July 1977 coup. I was a member of the Pakistan
Foreign Service and posted at London – by ZAB personally – and I resigned
rather than serve the military government or, in Lillian Hellmann’s words,
“cut my conscience to suit today’s fashion.” The only time I broached the
subject with her was when I asked her several years later what I should
say to those who ask me why I alone of all the Bhutto people had been left
out of the camp of victory. She did not answer that but I could see from
her expression that she was sensitive to what I had said. Once someone who
knew about such things and how they work, told me that she had tried both
times she was in office to find me a position to suit my wishes and my
experience but both times it was the ISI that had shot it down. One day, I
am going to ask the ISI – to quote Gen. Yahya Khan – at what point did I
inadvertently “untie its tethered goat.”
In 2001, while I was
rifling through some old papers, I came across a photograph of Benazir,
sent to her father and mother from school in the United States with a
long, loving note scribbled to them on the back. She must have been around
seventeen then. I mailed it to her in London, saying it belonged to her.
She wrote back to say how time had passed and how wistful one felt
thinking of those young and early years. In Simla, Benazir who had
accompanied her father because Begum Bhutto was ill at the time in
Karachi, was put under my charge, so to speak. She had barely turned 19
and was a big hit with the Indian media. I remember one headline that ran,
“Benazir is benazir.” Everybody wanted to interview her but I was under
instructions from ZAB himself to say no to all such requests. The only
exception made – after due permission from the President – was a meeting
with the late Indian journalist Dilip Mukerjee who had published a
hurriedly written biography of Bhutto. He told me that more than him, it
was his daughter, also Benazir’s age, who had her heart set on meeting
her. When I asked ZAB if an exception could be made in this case, he told
me to go ahead as long as I remained present at the meeting. Mukerjee was
thrilled when I told him that he could come along with his daughter to the
Vice Regal Lodge where we were staying. The two came but Benazir paid
little attention to the starry-eyed girl, instead going hammer and tongs
after Mukerjee, whom she faulted for having got several facts about her
father wrong. Mukerjee, one of India’s most respected journalists, and a
great Bengali gentleman of the old school, spent the meeting fending off
Benazir’s blows. At one point I asked her if we had not had enough of that
and if we could perhaps move on to other things. She reluctantly let go
and Mukerjee heaved a sigh of relief. She then turned to the girl and
spoke to her for quite some time to put her at ease. The Indians wanted
ZAB to see Pakeezah, a “Muslim social” as the Bombay film industry
classifies such productions. ZAB was not interested but felt that it would
be rude to say no and asked me to escort Benazir to the cinema on Simla’s
fabled Mall, which I did. We later took a walk and also visited a bookshop
where I bought many books for ZAB that he had asked me to do.
Except for the last year and a half or so, I kept a steady to and
fro email correspondence with Benazir. She was a great email sender,
though the last time we spoke I said to her that for long we had not
exchanged emails, whereas I often ran into people who bragged about
getting emails from her all the time. “Not emails, but SMS,” she replied.
I was not into SMS – one gadget less to fiddle with – but I had decided to
SMS her from now on. But that was not to be. I have more pictures of
Benazir than anyone I know – all my own work. Several of them are
appearing in this special TFT issue. Off and on, while rifling
through my piles of photographs, I would pick up some of hers and email
them to her. I have a message from her dated December 3 2003 which says,
“Dear Khalid bhai, Thank you for sending me the pictures taken at Dr.
Javed’s House (Dr Javed Manzur, Washington PPP president at whose house
she always met journalists and party workers). Your picture collection is
phenomenal, covering many a decade and many an era. Bibi.” Another mail
dated January 3 2004 says, “Such beautiful pictures you have. Thank you
for sending it to me. It brought back many memories of a happier time.” A
birthday greeting I sent her in 2002 brought back this response: “I am
writing to thank you for the greetings on the occasion of my birthday on
June 21, 2002. It was kind of you to remember the occasion. I appreciate
the prayers and the good wishes. It is such gestures which give me
strength to work for the restoration of a democratic process in our
country Pakistan.”
A set of pictures I took of her in 1992, when
she was living in a rented house in Islamabad’s F-8 sector, I sent to her
in early August 2003. She wrote on August 22, “Thank you for the photos
which I received. I was thin and wish I could be so again. It is too much
effort. Nice to know about Nadira becoming Lady Naipaul.” (When I took the
pictures, Nadira was interviewing her along with Roshan Dhunjibhoy for a
German TV channel.) When a scandal involving Pakistan’s UN ambassador
striking his woman friend broke in New York four years ago, the PPP issued
a formal condemnation. I wrote to Bibi about it, reminding her that Munir
Akram was Pakistan’s most brilliant ambassador and one of the few Sindhis
in the foreign service. She replied on January 14 2003, “Dear Khalid bhai,
Munir is a woman beater and PPP feels strongly about the rights of women.
A man who beats a woman is unfit, to my mind, to represent Pakistan.” She
wrote to me on May 31 2003, in response to my early birthday message, “It
is kind of you to remember my birthday so early on. Thank you for the good
wishes for the occasion. I am going to be half a century old and that
makes for reflection. I have written a poem called Banazir’s Story
inspired by Marvi of Malir, written by Shah Latif. Marvi was in exile from
her land and pined for it as I do too. I was moved when I read it and
adapted it to the present circumstances.” Daily Times published the entire
poem.
When Ijaz Batalvi died, I wrote a column on his passing in
these TFT pages. I stated that he was never the same after ZAB’s
execution and in later years and in private regretted his role in the
case. Rao Rashid wrote a letter to TFT castigating Batalvi’s role.
Benazir who saw the column wrote to me, “Dear KH, I saw this article. It
made me think the better of Rao for taking exception to the obituary on
Batalvi. It also cooled the heart to know that Batalvi was never the same
again and in private regretted it. Wish it could have been at a public
level. Batalvi would have had so much knowledge about what went on behind
the scenes. I firmly believe that someone has to come forward to tell the
truth, someone who was part of the fray and knew exactly what went on with
the assurance that what is wanted is an end to perversion of justice and
not retribution. This is why I keep calling for a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission knowing how many were tortured and how justice was shredded in
the name of justice itself. Bibi.”
When I passed on to her a
suggestion someone had made asking her to become Pakistan’s Sonia Gandhi,
she wrote, “Luckily, I come from a village in Larkana rather than Italy.”
In 2002, certain stories were planted in the press by the regime or its
friends that Benazir was not a graduate of Radcliffe. I got in touch with
Radcliffe, which confirmed that she was not only a graduate but had passed
with honours in 1973. Daily Times printed my story on July 13 2002. When
Benazir saw it on July 16, she wrote, “Khalid bhai, Got the message upon
my return. The regime began the wrong propaganda and I was to nail them on
the day of filing the nomination. They seized my papers previously and now
thought they could do ‘dada-giri’. However, I was alerted when FL (Farooq
Leghari) dismissed the government and argued that I was never a graduate.
Thank you for working to defending my reputation in the face of the
manifold lies of the regime. Insha Allah, all their lies will be caught.
Bibi.”
Yusuf Buch, who worked for several years as ZAB’s special
assistant for information, told me that ZAB wanted Benazir to be spared
the rough and tumble of politics. Instead, he wanted her to go into
foreign service, get married to a nice young man and raise a family. I
mentioned this in a column, which Benazir saw. She wrote to me, “I am
surprised Yusuf Buch told you that all my father wanted me to do was to
join the Foreign Service and get married and have children. Those close to
my father all know that he wanted me to go into politics. It was I who
wanted to join the Foreign Service. In fact, mother contested in 1977 to
pave the way for me to enter parliament when I turned twenty-five. When my
father was imprisoned, destiny took hold of my life and I followed the
path that he had chosen for me. He was proud of my having done that. The
greatest consolation I have is that I lived up to his expectations and
faced each crisis with fortitude as (he) would have wanted me to do.
Bibi.”
Benazir was a beautiful person. But she was not free of
faults. Once she said to me – it was her first term as prime minister –
that she was always judged harshly. I replied that she was judged harshly
because much was expected of her. The never-to-go-away charges of
corruption that hovered over her head bothered me deeply, as they did all
those who admired her and wished her well. Although she kept denying them,
the fact is that she was not pure as driven snow. Was it Asif Zardari who
led her to that path? Or was it something innate to her? She told me in
Casablanca in 1995 – if I have the year right – where she had gone for the
Islamic Summit, that when she was ejected out of 70 Clifton, all she had
on her were the clothes she was wearing, She told me that had her husband
not had “some money,” they would have been on their own.
I recall
walking on a Casablanca road, having just filed my report to my Lahore
newspaper from the telegraph office, when Benazir’s prime ministerial
cavalcade with sirens blaring passed me by. She saw me and had her car and
the rest of the motorcade come to a stop. Khalid Shafi, then chief of
protocol and ZAB’s ADC when I was his press secretary, jumped out of the
car and said, “The prime minister says get Khalid in the car and bring him
over.” I spent that entire afternoon with her, talking about old times and
about ZAB whom we both adored. Not always was she the best judge of
people, however. In her first term, it was people like Happy Minwala who
roosted around and pretended as if the sun rose every morning not from the
east but from some orifice on their person. When she fell, they abandoned
her without wasting a minute. I also could not understand how she could
come close to people like Gulzar Chaudhry (a dismissed patwari) who
because of her munificence became a millionaire. It always bothered me
that she would stay at his residence when in Lahore. That someone like
Rehman Malik, a policeman of dubious reputation, became such a close
companion of hers, I never quite understood. He christened himself as her
chief security adviser and yet he failed to protect her, first in Karachi,
where she was lucky to have survived, and then in Rawalpindi, where she
wasn’t. He has not even had the decency to offer an apology to the nation
and confess that he failed in the task he had assigned to himself or that
had been assigned to him. But let all that is now laid to rest with her in
the eternal earth of her beloved Sindh. She is one with Marvi with whom
she had once compared herself. She is gone and as the Quran says, speak
only well of the dead.
I asked three people – Husain Haqqani,
fellow correspondent and friend Iftikhar Ali in New York, and VOA
broadcaster Murtaza Solangi - to share with me briefly their memories of
Benazir. Let me end this long, rambling piece with their words. Husain
Haqqani, who came very close to her in her last years and did a lot of
work on her behalf in Washington and with the US media, wrote, “Benazir
Bhutto was the most amazing, loving and lovable person I have ever known.
For those who only saw her as a distant political figure, her human
dimension clearly did not matter. For everyone whose life she touched, her
humanity transcended the politics. Most powerful figures in Pakistan know
how to turn friends into enemies, but Benazir Bhutto had the capacity to
turn critics into admirers. When I first met her, I worked for her
opponent but she won me over by her charm and persuasion, leading to
fifteen years of close relations and my absolute personal loyalty to her.
She was told many things about me but she never believed any and on more
than one occasion put her appreciation or praise in writing. ‘I know
something about vilification, Haqqani Saab’ she would say.
“The day
after Farooq Leghari dismissed her second government I showed up to meet
Bibi who was under house arrest at the Prime Minister’s House. She turned
to someone present there and said, ‘See, I told you Haqqani Saab will
remain with us. He is not like (and then she named someone who had joined
Leghari’s cabinet even though he was a PPP senator after working as her
spokesman earlier). We disagreed vehemently once when I was Information
Secretary and she asked me to suggest a way of “keeping our friendship
while relocating you from here.” She asked why I did not consider
electoral politics in Karachi, which led me to move back to Karachi and
engage in direct politics for a while. Our relationship became much closer
after my marriage to Farahnaz Ispahani. Bibi sent a gift from Dubai she
said she had chosen herself and invited the two of us to visit her. She
said she knew this was the beginning of personal happiness for me. When
Farah and I moved to Washington in 2002, Bibi called us and arranged a
meeting every time she visited the US. I told her I did not have a home
big enough to entertain, unlike some of her rich doctor and Pakistani
businessmen supporters. She said she would be happy to meet me in my
office. Everyone at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was
surprised when Benazir Bhutto arrived unannounced at the reception one
morning and spent the entire day in my small cubicle. She spoke on the
phone to Asif Zardari, who was still in prison and being advised by the
then head of ISI’s Internal Wing to break with her and find happiness. I
heard her side of the conversation and she filled me in on what was said
from the other side. Then she told me, ‘You will now understand why Asif
remains so precious to me.’
“For the next five years, I assisted
Bibi as she tried to convince a sceptical Washington of the merits of
democracy in Pakistan. Hundreds of emails and text messages were exchanged
between us. She went over every word that was written on her behalf and
wrote significant portions of her own statements and articles. I was
always elated by emails that said ‘Excellent’ or ‘I will share these
points with the party’ in response to some article of mine. After I became
a professor at Boston University she introduced me to her American friends
as ‘my favourite professor.’ I probably wasn’t but she said it anyway and
it made me feel good. She had the capacity to make people feel good, which
is the most important attribute of a politician – something cold-blooded
analysts and technocrats cannot understand. Yesterday, I printed out one
of her recent emails and framed it alongside her portrait in my office. It
read, ‘Ur judgement is invariably correct haqqani sahib. So nice to work
with someone with such a good mind. Bibi.’ Even if she wrote it just to
make me feel good, I would rather believe that than the news that she is
not there any longer to lead the fight against the butchery of nihilists
and the arrogance of Pakistan’s authoritarian state
machinery.”
Iftikhar Ali, who was APP correspondent at the United
Nations in 1971, wrote, “I first saw Benazir in November of 1971 when she
came from Boston to join her father in New York who had come to fight
Pakistan’s case at the United Nations – a losing battle with Pakistani
troops failing to defend the country’s frontiers in what was East
Pakistan. Mr. Bhutto stayed at Pierre Hotel on Central Park. She appeared
to be Mr. Bhutto’s secretary as she picked up the phone virtually every
time I called. Mr. Bhutto had asked me to keep him informed about the
developments on the war front at any time of the day or night. He was not
the type who would rely on the information providedby the Pakistan
Mission. Whenever I called Mr. Bhutto’s hotel room, she would invariably
ask me, ‘Anything big?’ And I would tell her. Reuters had given me access
to their UN office and I would pick up the news from the ticker and read
out to him. When Mr. Bhutto was not in his room, she would ask me to tell
her the news and she would listen with great attention.
“But she
stayed in New York just over a week before returning to her college.
During that time, she came to the UN with her father a couple of times,
dressed in pantsuits. As far as I know, she never sat on the official
meetings which her father was having with diplomats at the UN. She always
waited outside talking to Mission officials. Whenever she spotted me, she
would ask me, ‘What’s the news on your net?’ She was remarkably thin, in
fact, skinny in those days. She could get along with everyone, and never
behaved like the daughter of a Deputy Prime Minister. Subsequently, I met
her a couple of times at Ambassador Iqbal Akhund’s residence where she
stayed during her holiday breaks at the college. She was into American
politics, especially as the race for 1972 presidential election was
picking up. My impression was that she was inclined towards Democrats –
her preferred candidate seemed to be Edmund Muskie, a liberal, who
subsequently couldn’t get the Democratic nomination. The party nominated
George McGovern, who lost to Richard Nixon badly. She was up-to-date on
American politics and generally dominated dinner conversations. And like
most young people in those days, she was against US involvement in the
Vietnam War.
“I never saw her until she was released from jail and
was allowed to travel out of Pakistan. In New York, she addressed a number
of highly emotional meetings of Pakistani supporters of Mr. Bhutto and
organised her party - Shabbir and Zulfiqar were her lieutenants. Because
of the news clampdown during Zia days, not many people knew about the
Bhutto case and she worked hard to apprise not only the Pakistanis but
also opinion leaders here. She lived very simply here mostly with family
friends, especially Shama Haider, Mrs. Bhutto’s secretary. There were no
parties or eating out in fancy restaurants. Shama always drove her around;
sometimes she also used PPP workers’ cars. She developed close relations
with her party workers, visited their homes and even knew the name of
their wives and children. During her Oct. visit, she was in the big
league. While she was invited to top class events in think-tanks and other
forums, she held two press conferences in the homes of her workers who
lived in such obscure places in New York that even taxi drivers have
difficulty getting there. There was hardly any place to sit in those homes
with dozens of reporters chasing her. I never had her direct phone number
but whenever I called Shama and told her that I wished to speak to
herabout some matter, she would call back within hours. She was a very
decent and charming person. May she rest in peace!”
Murtaza
Solangi, who is from Sindh, became close to her in the last three years of
her life, exchanging emails with her and speaking to her on the phone with
great frequency. He wrote, “She was the leader of the next century who had
completely changed her lifestyle to meet the political demands of this
age. No Pakistani politician has harnessed the Internet to political
advantage as she did. If she thought anybody would help advance her cause,
she was in instantaneous contact with that person. She traveled a lot in
the last eight years, but no matter what part of the world she was in, she
was accessible to those she wanted to stay in touch with. I have seen her
“sent by blackberry device” emails replied within two minutes of being
received. No matter how critical a question asked of her, she would find a
way to handle it with a cool answer. No matter what she thought of you,
she was always respectful. Like her father, she had an amazing memory. She
would always call you by your name. I think she had realised that this
could be her last trip to the US. She came here many times in 2007. And
every time she came, she was on every network, every radio station, in
every newspaper, at every think tank and forum in order to advance her
cause. The difference between 2006 and 2007 was that Musharraf was here
all over the place in 2006. In 2007, Benazir had conquered every American
institution and every American media outlet. She knew that she was running
out of time. She had to speak her mind before life quit on her.”
I
would like to close this tribute to that gentle lady whose like we will
not see again with something my friend Ziauddin wrote for Dawn from
London where he now lives: “She listened, defended and argued but never
for a moment did I find her losing her patience or her cool. I had gone to
(one) meeting after hearing many stories about her arrogance, hot temper
and short fuse. But the Benazir I met was a person one could communicate,
enter into heated debate and argue with. After this meeting I had several
longish debates with her mostly in the company of the late H.K. Burki. On
these occasions, I would listen mostly to the monologue of Mr Burki who
would dissect her policies and actions like a surgeon without mincing
words. She would listen attentively and would never make even the
slightest unpleasant response to the most unpleasant and uncharitable
criticism of Mr Burki. He was perhaps the first person to tell her on her
face that her choice of Farooq Ahmed Khan Leghari as the president was
wrong and he even went on to predict that Mr Leghari would betray her. In
my discussions with her, I found her to have a deep understanding of
economic issues. She was very well versed in the subject and could stand
her ground in a debate on economic issues even with the experts.”
– This is a regular column
by TFT’s Washington correspondent. He can be reached at
khasan2@cox.net
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There have been a lot of opinion pieces published about Benazir Bhutto, but from someone who knew her the way Khalid Hasan did. Hasan, who served as press secretary to the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and edited three volumes of his writings, knew Benazir since she was 18. Hasan is now the Washington correspondent for The Friday Times, and the Daily Times, two of Pakistan's most important papers and he has written a 6,000-word(!) essay about her. Here's how the piece begins:
